Saul Austerlitz
By Saul Austerlitz
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News Groggers Defame Villain, Ennoble Twirler
Step into any synagogue on Purim this year, and prepare to be assaulted by a terrifyingly ferocious din during the reading of the Megillah. At every mention of the name Haman, congregants interrupt the reader, who often must pause for 10 seconds or more as a roar of clapping, booing, hooting, hissing, whistling and foot…
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Culture An Israeli Film Juggles High Moral Purpose and Comedy
It’s nice to see a filmmaker indulge his own obsessions as thoroughly as Eytan Fox does with his new film, “Walk on Water.” Fox’s last film, “Yossi & Jagger,” was a gay romance set in the Israeli military, and his new work cooks with the same ingredients, adding in Israeli-German relations and the ever-present specter…
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Culture Swimmers Who Made Their Mark –– Out of the Pool
In the summer of 1936, as the world’s greatest athletes convened in Berlin for their quadrennial competition, the Austrian contingent was lacking its champion swimmer, a young woman who had broken 12 national records that year. The athletic entourages of all the countries of the world streamed past the viewing stand in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium,…
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Culture Modern vs. Orthodox Off-Broadway
The new off-Broadway play “Modern Orthodox” begins familiarly enough, with an uncomfortable encounter. Two strangers awkwardly introduce themselves, sitting at a table in a restaurant in midtown New York. The two strangers are named Ben and Hershel; Ben is prepared to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Hannah, and Hershel is the jeweler whose engagement rings…
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Culture An American Journalist’s Hasidic Tale
The Rabbi of 84th Street: The Extraordinary Life of Haskel Besser By Warren Kozak HarperCollins, 200 pages, $24.95. * * *| Since the era of the Baal Shem Tov and the first Hasidic leaders, one of the primary attractions of Hasidism as a movement has been the Hasidic story. A little shaggy-dog — a bit…
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Culture Derrida | Wrestling With the Angel That Was Himself
Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint By Hélène Cixous Columbia University Press, 168 pages, $27.50 * * *| During the era of the Talmud, the period of the scholars known as the Amoraim (200-500 C.E.) was dedicated to the fleshing out of the sparse, cryptic pronouncements of their predecessors, the Tannaim. In…
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Culture Warts, Not War: Israeli Films Shift the Focus Away From the Mideast Conflict
When it comes to directorial style, the winds continually shift between a more-is-more outlook — where camera and mise-en-scène run wild in an effort to draw attention to the means of production –– and a philosophy of austerity strongly opposed to showy or unnecessary camera movement. The latter has gained adherents recently, with the work…
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Culture Does Modern Orthodoxy Have a Future?
Orthodoxy Awakens: The Belkin Era and Yeshiva University By Victor B. Geller Urim Publications, 295 pages, $26.95. * * *| An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School By Seth Farber Brandeis University Press, 228 pages, $34.95. * * *| Even in the midst of unprecedented growth of its institutions, Modern…
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